Feminist to Know: the Fields Sisters

Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields are sisters and academics studying the function of racism and race in the United States. Together, they wrote Racecraft, a seminal work that theorizes racism begot race, rather than the other way around. Racecraft draws comparisons between the function of race and witchcraft; it describes a set of social practices that produce race as a justifying excuse for protecting and perpetrating inequality of all sorts, including on the basis of skin color, gender, and class.

In her own work, Karen E. Fields is a sociologist who has written about colonial Africa and, in conjunction with her grandmother Mamie Fields, a memoir that recounts Mamie’s experiences in the Jim Crow South as a process of intergenerational historiography. 

Barbara J. Fields is a historian who also examines U.S. history, specifically the history of the American South and its links to American capitalism. She is a MacArthur Fellow, and is also known for her article “Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the United States of America,” which indicts the circularity of our cultural conceptions of race and racism. She the first African American woman to earn tenure at Columbia University.

The sisters were born in Charleston, South Carolina before moving to Washington, D.C., and later New York. They are both consequential scholars in their own right, and either hold or have held teaching positions at many of the most prominent universities in the United States.